A Large Anthology of Science Fiction

by Jerry

  “Yeah,” Dawson thought, thumbing through pages. “If I believed in this dream, I’d . . . uh . . . erect secondary delusions. I’d think of a good reason why there was a windowpane. Only there isn’t any reason, luckily.”

  As he walked out of the library, and saw the stream of street traffic before him, he suddenly felt that he was dreaming. And the windowpane was back again.

  He knew he was lying close against it, his nose almost touching the glass, inhaling dust with every breath, and the smothering, dreary, somehow brownish odor of dead flies. It was singularly horrid that feeling of suffocation and dead despair. He could feel the hard something under his hand, and he knew with a sudden sense of urgency that unless he moved it now he was more than likely to smother there with his nose against the glass, smother from sheer inertia, inability to move. He knew he must not slip back into the dream of being Dawson. This was reality. There was nothing tangible about Dawson and his fool’s paradise and his dream-city of New York. Yet he could lie here and die with the smell of dead flies in his nostrils, and Dawson would never suspect until that dreadful last moment between waking and death, when it was too late to move the . . . the hard object beneath his hand.

  Traffic roared at him. He stood at the curb, white and sweating. The unreality of the scene before him was briefly shocking. He stood motionless, waiting until the hollow world had resumed its tangibility. Then, his lips tight, he hailed a taxi.

  Two stiff shots of whiskey were comforting. He was able to contemplate working on the current brief, a liability case which presented no difficulties. Carruthers had gone to court, and he didn’t see his partner that afternoon. Nor did the—hallucination recur.

  But, after dinner, Dawson telephoned his ex-wife, and spent the evening with her at a roof-garden. He didn’t drink much. He was trying to recapture something of the vital reality that had existed during the early part of their marriage. But he wasn’t too successful.

  The next morning Carruthers came in, perched on Dawson’s desk, and cadged a cigarette. “What’s the verdict?” he wanted to know. “Do you hear voices?”

  “Often,” Dawson said. “I’m hearing one now. Yours.”

  “But is Hendricks any good, really?”

  Dawson felt unreasonably irritated. “Do you expect him to wave a magic wand? All therapy takes time.”

  “Therapy, huh? What did he say was wrong?”

  “Nothing much.” Dawson didn’t want to discuss it. He opened a law book pointedly. Carruthers lit his cigarette, dropped the match into the wastebasket, and shrugged. “Sorry. I’d thought—”

  “Oh, I’m all right. Hendricks is pretty good, really. My nerves are a bit shot.”

  Comforted, Carruthers said something and went back to his office. Dawson turned a page, read a few words, and felt things close in. The morning sunlight, slanting through the window, faded abruptly. Under his hand was a cold, hard object, and strong in his nostrils was the dusty smell of despair. And this time he knew it was reality.

  It did not last long. When it had gone, he sat quietly staring at the hollow desk and the hollow wall beyond it. The sounds from the traffic below were dream-noises. The curl of smoke spiraling up from the wastebasket was dream-smoke.

  “I hope you don’t think you’re real,” Tweedledum said scornfully.

  He noticed that the smoke had changed to orange flame. The curtain caught fire. Presently he would waken.

  Someone screamed. Miss Anstruther, his secretary, stood in the doorway, pointing. After that, there was confusion, shouting, and the spurting of a fire extinguisher.

  The flames died. The smoke vanished.

  “Oh, dear,” Miss Anstruther said, wiping a smudge from her nose. “It’s lucky I came in when I did, Mr. Dawson. You had your nose in that book—”

  “Yeah,” Dawson said. “I didn’t even notice. I’d better speak to Mr. Carruthers about throwing matches in the wastebaskets.”

  Instead, he telephoned Hendricks. The psychiatrist could see him in an hour. Dawson passed the time with a crossword puzzle, and, at ten, went upstairs and stripped. Hendricks used stethoscope, blood-pressure gadget, and other useful devices.

  “Well?”

  “You’re all right.”

  “Sound as a nut, eh?”

  “A nut?” Hendricks said. “Come on. Let’s have it. What happened?”

  Dawson told him. “It’s like epilepsy. I don’t know when I’ll have these attacks. They’ve never lasted long so far, but they might. And afterwards the dream-feeling hangs over. I knew very well that there was a fire in the wastebasket, but it wasn’t a real fire.”

  “Daydreams are apt to carry over a bit. Reorientation isn’t always instantaneous.”

  Dawson chewed on a fingernail. “Sure, but suppose Carruthers was falling out of a window? I wouldn’t have tried to stop him. Hell, I’d have walked off a roof myself. I’d have known it wouldn’t have hurt me. It’s a dream.”

  “Do you feel you’re dreaming now?”

  “No,” Dawson said, “not now, of course! It’s only during these attacks, and afterward—”

  “You felt that hard object under your hand?”

  “Yeah. And the smell. There was something else, too—”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Move that object. It’s a compulsion, in four-bit words. And don’t worry about it.”

  “Not even if I walk off a roof?”

  “Stay away from roofs for a while,” Hendricks said. “Once you find out the meaning of this symbolism, you’ll be cured?

  “And if I don’t, I’ll get secondary delusions.”

  “You’ve been reading up on it, eh? Look. If you think you’re the richest man in the world, and you haven’t got a dime in your pocket, how’ll you rationalize that?”

  “I don’t know,” Dawson said. “Maybe I’m eccentric.”

  Hendricks shook his head, his plump cheeks bobbing. “No, you’ll develop the logical delusion a supplementary one that you’re the victim of an organized plot to rob you. Catch? Don’t try to assign phony meanings to your dusty windowpane. Don’t start thinking a little man named Alice is popping out of the woodwork with a windowpane tucked under his arm. Or that the glass-blowers’ union wants to persecute you. Just find the real meaning behind the symbolism. As I told you. Move that gadget under your hand. Don’t simply be passive about it.”

  “O.K.,” Dawson said, “I’ll move it. If I can.”

  He dreamed that night, but it was a typical dream. The familiar hallucination didn’t emerge. Instead, he found himself standing on a gibbet, a rope about his neck. Hendricks came rushing up, waving a paper roll tied with a blue ribbon. “You’re reprieved!” the psychiatrist shouted. “Here’s your pardon! Signed by the governor.” He thrust the roll into Dawson’s hands. “Open it,” he ordered urgently. “Untie the ribbon.” Dawson didn’t want to, but Hendricks kept insisting. He pulled at the ribbon. As he did, he saw that it was tied to a long cord that snaked across the platform and vanished from sight beneath it. A bolt clicked. He felt the trapdoor quiver under his feet. By puffing at the ribbon, he had opened the drop; he was falling.

  He woke up, sweating. The room was dark and silent. Cursing under his breath, Dawson got up and took a cool shower. He had not had nightmares for years.

  There were, after that, two more interviews with Hendricks. Each time the psychiatrist probed more deeply. But the refrain never altered. Recognize the symbol. Move your hand. Remember.

  On the third day, as Dawson sat waiting in Hendricks’ outer office, he remembered.

  The familiar, leaden, sick inertia swept over him. Desperately he tried to focus on the buildings outside the window. But he could not battle the tide. At the last moment Hendricks’ advice occurred to him, and, as he felt the cold, hard object under his palm, he made a tremendous effort to move his hand.

  To the left, something told him. To the left.

  It was hard to battle that lethargy, that
smothering, dusty suffocation of despair. And it was hard to move. But he strained to send the impulse down his arm, into stiff fingers, and the effort told. He felt something click into place, and . . . and . . .

  He remembered.

  The last thing before . . .

  Before what?

  “Vital therapy,” a voice said. “We grow fewer yearly. And we must guard against that plague.”

  Karestly ran an eight-fingered hand over his sweating, bald head. “The tests show you need it, Dawson.”

  “I hadn’t—”

  “You wouldn’t know of course. It’d be imperceptible except by the instruments. But you need the therapy, that’s certain.”

  “I can’t spare the time,” Dawson said. “The simplification formulas are just beginning to clear up. How long must I stay in the vorkyl?”

  “Half a year,” Karestly said. “It doesn’t matter.”

  “And Pharr went in last month.”

  “He needed it.”

  Dawson stared at the wall, made a mental signal, and opaqueness faded to translucence and transparency. He could see the City.

  Karestly said, “You’d never vorkylled before. You’re one of the youngest. It isn’t bad. It’s stimulating, curative, and necessary.”

  “But I feel normal.”

  “The machines don’t lie. The emotion factor is wrong.

  Listen to me, Dawson. I’m a great deal older than you, and I’ve been in the vorkyl twelve times.”

  Dawson stared. “Where to?”

  “Different eras each time. The one best fitted for my particular warp. Once it was Brazil in 1890. Another time, Restoration London. And the Second Han Empire. I had plenty to do. I spent ten years in Brazil, building a rubber empire.”

  “Rubber?”

  Karestly smiled. “A substance it was important at that time. I kept busy. It’s fine therapy. In those days, the only therapy they knew involved painting, construction visual and tangible, not the emotional and psychic therapy we use. ‘However, their minds weren’t developed.”

  “I hate the idea of being shut up in a five-sensed body,” Dawson said.

  “You wouldn’t know any better. There’s the artificial mnemonic angle. Your life-force will take possession of the body that’s created for you at the therapic epoch we choose, and you’ll have a full set of false memories, created especially for that period. You’ll probably begin as a child. There may be temporal compression, so you’ll be able to live thirty or forty years in a half-year of our time.”

  “I still don’t like it.”

  “Time travel,” Karestly said, “is the best therapy known today. You live in a new environment, with a new set of values. And that’s the vital part. You get away from the current herd instinct that’s caused all the trouble.”

  “But—” Dawson said, “but! Only four thousand of us still sane, in all the world! And unless we work fast—”

  “We’re not immune. The whole trouble is that for hundreds of generations the race has followed false values, which conflicted with the primary instincts. Over-complication plus over-simplification, both in the wrong places. We haven’t kept pace with our growing mentality. There was a man Clemens who owned a mechanical typesetter that was perfect except for one thing. It was too _complicated. When it worked, it was ideal, but it kept breaking down.”

  “Old stuff,” Dawson said. “I know the trouble. The machines are so enormously complicated now that humans can’t keep up with them.”

  “We’re solving it,” Karestly said. “Slowly, but surely. There are four thousand of us. And we know the right therapy now.

  After you’ve had six months in the vorkyl, you’ll be a new man. You’ll find temporal therapy is foolproof and absolutely certain.”

  “I hope so. I want to get back to my work.”

  “If you went back to it now, you’d be insane in six months,” Karestly pointed out. “Temporal travel is like preventive serum shots. You’ll be occupied; we’ll send you back to the twentieth century—”

  “That far back?”

  “That period’s indicated, in your case cell be given a complete set of artificial memories, and, wale you’re in the past, you’ll have no consciousness of reality. Of this reality, I mean.”

  “Well—” Dawson said.

  “Come on.” Karestly rose and floated toward the transporter-disk. “The vorkyl’s ready for you. The matrix is set. All you have to do is—”

  Dawson got into the case. It closed behind him. He took a last look at Karestly’s friendly face and tightened his hand on the control. He moved it toward the right.

  Then he was Fred Dawson, with a complete set of artificial memories, in the orphan asylum in Illinois.

  But now he lay in the vorkyl, his nose against dusty glassocene that smelled of dead flies, and the vitiated air tore at his throat as he tried to breathe. All was in gray semi-darkness around him. He sent out a frantic thought-command.

  Somewhere light grew. The distant wall faded to transparency. He could see the City.

  It had changed. It was older. And a heaped pile of dust made a canopy atop the vorkyl in which he rested.

  The immense red sun washed the city in bloody gloom. There was no sign of organized activity. Figures moved here and there in the ruins. He could not make out what they were doing.

  He looked for Administration Building, the last stronghold of the race. It had altered, too. A long time must have passed since he had entered the vorkyl. For ruin had touched the great tower, and the white, naked shapes that crawled up and down the structure showed no sign of intelligence. The last light had gone out, then. The tide of madness had engulfed the four thousand.

  He used his seventh sense of perception, and his guess was confirmed. In all the world, there was no sanity. The herd instinct had triumphed.

  And he could not breathe. That suffocating horror was a reality now. The last oxygen left in the sealed case was rapidly being absorbed by his now active lungs. He could, of course, open the vorkyl.

  To what?

  Dawson moved his hand. The control swung to the right again.

  He was sitting in the psychiatrist’s outer office. The receptionist was at her desk, scribbling something; she didn’t look at him. The white light of morning sunshine made patterns on the rug.

  The reality—

  “You may go in now, Mr. Dawson.”

  Dawson stood up and walked into Hendricks’ sanctum. He shook hands, muttered something, and sank into a chair.

  Hendricks referred to his charts. “O.K., Fred,” he said. “Feel up to another word-association test? You’re looking a bit better.”

  “Am I?” Dawson said. “Maybe I know what the symbol represents now.”

  Hendricks looked at him sharply. “Do you?”

  “Maybe it isn’t a symbol at all. Maybe it’s a reality.”

  Then the familiar sensation came back, the dusty, suffocating claustrophobia, and the windowpane, and the brownish, dry smell, and the sense of terrible urgency. But there was nothing to be done about it now, nothing at all. He waited. In a moment it was gone again, and he looked across the desk at Hendricks, who was saying something about the danger of secondary delusions, of rationalizing.

  “It’s a matter of finding the right sort of therapy,” insisted the hollow man.

  THE END.

  CONQUERORS’ ISLE

  Nelson Bond

  “You’ve got to believe this,” said Brady. He spoke with tense, white-knuckled ferocity, his eyes intent on those of the older man. “It sounds utterly impossible, I know. It sounds—it sounds crazy. That’s why I’m here. But it’s the truth, and you’ve got to believe it! Got to—sir,” he finished, belatedly acknowledging his listener’s seniority.

  Lieutenant Commander Gorham said quietly: “At ease, Lieutenant. I’m here to consult with you as a physician, not order your cure as a superior officer. Suppose we ignore the braid while you tell me about it?”

  Joe Brady smiled. It was
his first smile in weeks, and his face could not quite accomplish it. His lips twisted jerkily, but his eyes remained blank windows into torment.

  He said: “Thank you, Doctor. Where would you like me to begin?”

  Gorham shuffled the pages of the lieutenant’s case history. Random excerpts telescoped three years of spotless if not spectacular service: Brady, Joseph Travers . . . Age: 24 . . . Graduated, U.S.N.A., 1941 . . . Pre-Flight Training, Sarasota, 1941-2 . . . Assigned: U.S.S. Stinger . . . Lieutenant (j.g.) 1942 . . . Group Citation . . . Recommended for . . .

  “It’s your story,” said the doctor carefully. “You know what it is you want me to believe. The trouble began, I understand, on your last bombing mission?”

  “That’s right. Or rather, that’s when my troubles began. The thing’s been going on for longer than that—much longer. Years, certainly; perhaps decades.” Brady’s fingers were like talons on the desk top. “Someone’s got to do something, Doctor! Time is racing by, and with every passing day they grow stronger. I’ve got to make people understand—”

  “At the beginning?” suggested Gorham. “Suppose you start with that unfortunate last flight.”

  His calm matter-of-fact tone had a soothing effect on the younger man. Brady’s voice lost its high note of hysteria.

  “Yes, sir,” he said. “Very good, sir. Well, then, it was this way. We accomplished our mission and started for him—”

  We accomplished our mission (said Lieutenant Brady) and started home. “Home” was, of course, the Stinger. I can tell you, now that the war’s over, where we were and what we were doing. We were cruising the South China Sea, roughly off Palawan, between the Philippines and Indo-China. Our job was to harass enemy shipping in that area, breaking the life line between the Straits and the Nipponese home islands. Our task force was in position to support any one of a dozen land invasions from Labuan to Hainan, and our air arm periodically feinted at concentration points to confuse the Japs.